1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a camera module used as an image pickup device.
2. Related Art
In portable terminals, there are various products equipped with image pickup devices. The image pickup devices of the portable terminals employ small size camera modules. In the camera module, a lens unit, an image pickup device, and circuit components such as a chip capacitor constituting a control circuit are mounted in a package.
As decrease in size has been required for portable terminals, decrease in size and thickness has also been required for camera modules mounted in the portable terminals. For this reason, various methods of manufacturing a camera module have been proposed. For example, instead of a method of arranging the circuit components on a substrate in parallel (i.e., not stacked), there is a method of stacking the circuit components on an image pickup device, a method of embedding the circuit components in a substrate on which the image pickup device is mounted, or a method of forming a cavity in a substrate and mounting the image pickup device in the cavity (see e.g., JP-A-2005-6279 and JP-A-2007-181212).
In order to decrease the size of the camera module, the height of the camera module may be decreased. In this case, the space between the lens and the image pickup device is decreased. However, in order to achieve high image quality (an increase in the number of pixels), it is necessary to increase the distance between the lens and the sensor surface of the image pickup device. This configuration is advantageous in light of a lens design, and enables high performance.
However, in the related-art camera module, for example, there is a method of embedding the circuit components in the substrate on which the image pickup device is mounted. In this method, it is possible to reduce a planar area of the camera module, but the thickness of the substrate is increased. Hence, in a case where the separation distance between the image pickup device and the lens is maintained, the decrease in the height of the camera module is limited as a whole.